A critique of Donna J. Haraway: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016).
Behind materialism in all its forms lies the figure of the Great Mother, as the economy, as the welfare state ... we are ... utterly at her mercy, for the environment is uncaring and merciless; it devours and destroys (Rupert Sheldrake: The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God).
For Haraway, the bleakness of Paul Crutzen's Anthropocene calls for a new cene, a new catchword to assist in the telling of stories (speculative fabulations). In a act of plagiarism, Haraway snatches H. P. Lovecraft's tentacular monster-god (etymologically chtonic), coining the Chthulucene, a new era outside of linear time, beyond hope, beyond reason, post-truth. The genderqueer dweller of the Chthulucene rubs elbows with the critters of the compost heap (bugs, fungi, microbes) but unlike those critters, remains childless in order to save the planet. These are the critters, blind termites patiently nibbling at the very foundations of Western culture.
Make Kin, Not Babies.
In what I would call, following Neumann, an act of uroboric incest, Haraway wishes for the archetypal Hero to be devoured by the Dragon, who is the Great Mother (Erich Neumann: The Origins and History of Consciousness). Unwittingly perhaps, she invokes the authoritarianism of the hive mind, where the collective triumphs over the individual, night over day, matter over mind. Granted, a new order will not result from technofixes but, apparently, the repetition ad nauseam of catchwords, perhaps to lull the masses into surrender of I-ness, vulnerable yet again to the surreptitiously implemented technofixes of some anonymous Authority. Towards a green utopia with or without human critters, Haraway asks:
Who lives and who dies, and how, in this kinship rather than that one?
Fine, let's go with the Chthulucene for now, the latest in the taxonomy of post-modern or Romantic worldings. Western man has already largely surrendered his adolescent arrogance anyway, anticipating a post-imperialist, multi-polar political world order. Besides, the hegemony of mechanistic, scientific materialism is done with. Western man is trying to re-integrate the levels of his being, the physical and the spiritual, the archaic and the contemporary. I can feel aligned with Haraway in passages likes this one:
The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene ... and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.
But I want to make amendments. First, the Hero can not be subdued for good. It is his task to slay the dragon of preconscious existence, separating earth from sky: the differentiation of subject and object. It is the part in the cosmic drama delegated to humanity, uniquely among critters. If humanity is to persist in the ages to come, even or especially when situated in sympoietic multispecies relationalities, (self-)awareness will have to be strengthened and affirmed. Second, let the female reproductive instinct be part of the Chthulucene with a vengeance. Feminism without misanthropy and misandry. Venerate the Great Mother in her life-affirming aspect. Let's celebrate genealogy and ethnicity, our neck of the woods on the many-branched tree of life. #bookstr #haraway #postmodernism #anthropocene #feminism #philosophy #artstr
Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.